The more one learns about the widespread looting of Iraqi
museums and libraries two weeks ago, the more appalling it
seems.

"Not since the Spanish conquistadors ravaged the Aztec and Inca
cultures has so much been lost so quickly," wrote Andrew
Lawler in Science. ("Ten Millenia of Culture Pilfered Amid
Baghdad Chaos," April 18.)

"Long after Saddam Hussein is forgotten, long after the oil is
gone, people will remember this destruction of the world's
greatest archive of the human past," said archeologist John
Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art.

Those who stole antiquities for profit at least paid them the
boring compliment of acknowledging their financial worth. But
how can one understand those who destroyed such artifacts and
set fire to manuscripts, annihilating a precious part of their
own heritage?

There is evidently a deeply rooted impulse to attack precisely
those institutions that are the repositories of history and
the foundations of culture and civilization. It does not make
sense; it tends to destroy the very possibility of "sense."

In case anyone thought that such nihilistic impulses were
limited to remote geographical regions and cultures, the U.S.
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recently
announced a need for new regulations to deal with threatening
behavior directed towards U.S. government archives.

An April 18 Federal Register notice reported an "increased
number of email and telephone threats received in NARA
facilities." See:

Official efforts to restrict the public dissemination of
information would be a lot more efficient if only they didn't
depend on human beings to carry them out, a defect for which
one may be thankful at a time when public access to government
information faces new constraints.

As happens with some regularity, an April 2002 Defense
Department document concerning a database of toxic chemical
release information that was not supposed to be publicly
disclosed nevertheless found its way onto the world wide web.

The document is clearly marked for limited distribution and is
said to be subject to the Arms Export Control Act. It further
states on the title page that violation of these restrictions
on dissemination is "subject to severe criminal penalties."

"Destroy [this document] by any method that will prevent
disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document."

Shrinking public access to toxic chemical inventory data is the
subject of "Balancing security of plants with the public's
right to know" by Jennifer Lin and Adam Fifield, Philadelphia
Inquirer, April 21:

The 1954 overthrow of the government of Guatemala in a CIA-led
coup will be the subject of a U.S. State Department conference
next month entitled "The United States, Guatemala, and Latin
America: New Perspectives on the 1954 Coup." That episode
served in some ways as the template for a whole series of cold
war covert actions.

The State Department has just published the schedule of the May
15-16 conference, linked from here:

The Security Service of Ukraine (Sluzhba Bespeky Ukrayiny or
SBU) this week posted an archive of declassified documents
concerning the nuclear power plants at Chernobyl and the
accident that occurred there on April 26, 1986.

The 121 documents, published in Ukrainian, detail construction
flaws that were identified by the KGB long before the 1986
accident and provide contemporary accounts of the accident
itself. The Chernobyl site remains a disaster area and a
public health hazard.

Soviet secrecy concerning the Chernobyl accident is one of the
factors that precipitated Gorbachev's glasnost campaign and
arguably helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The April 21 SBU release announcing publication of the
declassified documents is here (thanks to my mom Lilla
Aftergood for some translation assistance):